In the decade and a half since economic liberalization began in Jordan, a little noticed but large-scale organizing trend has taken over the formal provision of social welfare, redefining the institutional conception of familial identity in the process. For over one third of the population, kin solidarities have been reorganized, formalized, and registered as nongovernmental organizations in an attempt to cope with the removal of basic social provisioning by the state. Although kinship clearly has been a major element in Jordan's history, the present phenomena alter traditional familial institutions, change kin lineages, and institutionalize the economic salience of family relations. In turn, the relationship of the populace to the state has changed, marginalizing previously regime-supporting groups and facilitating the implementation of economic neoliberalism without significant protest. Repackaged as charitable elements of civil society, these family associations are sanctioned and encouraged by the state and international community. Although they are not regime creations, family associations reinforce the Jordanian regime's efforts at political deliberalization. The new elites who head the organizations have been placated through indirect incorporation into the regime; they now wield significant economic power over fellow kin and have enhanced social status backed by the new group. Furthermore, the trend mainly consists of families without immediate ambitions of entering national politics. These are not the traditional elite families.

In the Middle East over the past half-century, three religious processes have grown together. One, the growth of fundamentalism, has received worldwide attention both by academics and journalists. The others, the bureaucratization of religion and the state co-optation of religion, of equal duration but no less importance, have received much less attention. The bureaucratization of religion focuses on the hierarchicalization of religious specialists and state co-optation of religion focuses on their neutralization as political opponents. Few commentators link the three processes. In Jordan, fundamentalism, the bureaucratization of religion (BOR), and state co-optation of religion (SCR) have become entwined sometimes in mutually supportive and sometimes in antagonistic relations. The following case study will describe and analyze the implications of this mutual entanglement for the relations of state and civil society and for the human beings simultaneously bureaucratized and “fundamentalized.”

With socioeconomic liberalization and development, especially since 1980, Turkey has witnessed rapid changes in consumption patterns and fashion styles. Often one fad rapidly follows another, creatively combining symbols of the Ottoman era, foreign influences, and regional traditions. Kandiyoti argues that “[t]here is little doubt that class cultures in Turkey are increasingly being shaped and redefined through the medium of consumption.” Thus, consumption has emerged recently as a central concern and analytical tool in historical, anthropological, and sociological works on Ottoman and Turkish society. One trend focuses on the secular high-income class' “globalized” consumption patterns and lifestyle, especially as expressed through shopping patterns and the commoditization of symbols of Turkish secularism. Another, more prevalent, trend is more concerned with the upwardly mobile Islamists' attempt at articulating their newly gained economic status through consumption. A third directs attention to the history of consumption and “the everyday” to counter a previous emphasis on production and state politics in the Ottoman Empire.

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said considers the topos of the voyage North as one of the motifs in the “culture of resistance.” Traveling North is seen in this respect as a reversal of imperial and colonial history. When, for instance, Mustafa Saء ed in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North goes to England, his objective is to conquer—so he thinks—with his “penis” the country of his colonizer. The cultural encounter between Britain and the Arab–African nation of Sudan involves for Saءed a configuration of power in which the West is imagined as a woman to be raped in the same way colonial armies raped the virgin territories of the Orient and Africa.

Despite the attention that scholars have lavished on Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima, the historiographical significance of that remarkable work is still not well understood. Scholars continue to discuss the Muqaddima largely within the context of Islamic historiography, even though most of them regard it as an anomaly that differs fundamentally from the works of other Muslim historians. In certain respects, the Muqaddima belongs to an Islamic historical tradition, that of al-Tabari and al-Masעudi. Yet, its dominant intellectual lineage is the rationalist thought that stretches from the Peripatetic philosophers, and especially from Aristotle (384–322 BCE), through such Greco–Islamic thinkers as al-Farabi (870–950 CE), Ibn Sina (980–1037 CE), and Ibn Rushd (1126–1198 CE) onward to European philosophical historians and sociologists of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It is precisely because Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406 CE) used the logical apparatus and materialist assumptions of this rationalist tradition as the conceptual basis for his new historical science that he can be characterized as the last Greek historian. He can be considered the first Annaliste historian because the same Greek philosophical heritage influenced both the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu (1689–1755 CE), and also Durkheim's student, Marc Bloch, the cofounder of the Annales School. This heritage is also visible in an attenuated form in Fernand Braudel's distinction between the longue durée and the history of events. Indeed, Ibn Khaldun developed what modern scholars would identify as a structuralist methodology, using classical logic to identify enduring socioeconomic realities underlying cultural phenomena and ephemeral events, what he describes as the “general conditions of regions, races and periods that constitute the historian's foundation.”